


awake, arise, or be forever fallen

by Ariesgirl666



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Claustrophobia, Descensum au, F/M, No Proofreading We Die Like Men, Past Abuse, all that fun stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 16:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16391300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariesgirl666/pseuds/Ariesgirl666
Summary: title from John Milton's Paradise Lost cause I'm that bitchAU where Mallory and Michael first meet through Descensum.





	awake, arise, or be forever fallen

 

Mallory closed her eyes and descended.

 

_Everyone knew Mallory’s grandfather hadn’t been quite right since Grandma died. But that didn’t stop her parents from sending her off to spend time with him anyway._

_Mallory remembered the long walks through the woods as her grandfather told her what plants were poisonous and which weren’t. Particularly she remembered the trapdoor hidden under the carefully placed leaves with one iron lock and one iron key her grandfather wore around his neck._

_She remembered the long set of stairs leading down into the forest floor, the smell of preservatives and the feeling of being inside a tomb as her grandfather shut the trapdoor carefully. “This is where we’ll stay when the world ends, Mallory,” he would say.  Sometimes he thought she was her grandmother, also named Mallory. But that was alright._

 

Mallory opened her eyes and the pit of her stomach rolled. She stood, bracing one hand against the shelves, feeling the cans by memory. She was on one of the cots against the wall, wearing the lace-up boots and pink pinafore she’d been wearing that day. It was too tight now, but she couldn’t feel it pinching.

 

_Her grandfather was so carefully meticulous with the way he laid out their plans for survival when the world ended in 2012. He stacked the cans by alphabet and then cross-referenced them by date. He had one shelf for pictures of Mallory’s grandmother, and a box of her possessions under the desk. There were candles, organized by color, in the cabinets. Nothing in the room was flammable, Mallory’s grandfather would explain to her._

 

Mallory knew what memory she was trapped in.

 

_Her grandfather was so busy counting cans that he forgot to take his granddaughter out of the hole in the ground for three hours._

 

“I can’t do this again,” Mallory whimpered. She pressed her hands against the wood grain of the trapdoor, feeling the rough stone of the steps against her bare knees. She shoved, and it barely rattled. Mallory was crying. “I can’t, I can’t do this again, I can’t.”

 

_Three hours that felt like a year to Mallory -that had_ become _a year to Mallory, as she would later find that her powers had activated in her panic and aged her forward a year._

 

Mallory slammed her shoulder into the trapdoor and screamed. With the force of her scream, all the candles went out, and she was alone in the dark.

_She was too short to find the cabinet with the candles, so she’d huddled in the dark by the stairs singing to herself until her throat went raw._

 

Mallory stumbled down the stairs, skinning both her knees. She curled up into a ball at the bottom of the stairs. _I’m never getting out of here._

_When they found Mallory, a year older with her hair all grown out and her limbs in awkward teenage angles, they’d sent her grandfather to the retirement home._

 

The candles all burned bright suddenly, and Mallory blinked tears out of her adjusting eyes. There was a boy, around her age, with eyes like pieces of a broken sky, looking at her like she was something to dissect.

_Her grandfather died of a heart attack on December 31, 2011._

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the boy said, disingenuously, and his cold voice echoed in the bomb shelter.

Mallory put her hands to the sides of her head. _go away_ , she thought violently, and he laughed. Looked at her like she really was a little girl. “Use your words, Mallory.”

“What are you doing here?” Mallory gathered her courage in both hands to ask.

“I’m exploring your personal hell.” Michael picked up an unlit candle and looked at it, then dropped it on the floor. Mallory watched its round, looming shadow on the wall as it rolled out of the light of its peers.

 

“My personal hell?” Mallory remembered. “Descensum!”

“That’s right. You must be one of Cordelia’s witches.” He smiled at her, and Mallory felt something ice-sharp clamp around her heart. Her grandfather always said she should trust her intuition.

“Who are you?”

“You’ll find out. It’s time to wake up now, Mallory.”

 

Mallory sat up with a gasp.

* * *

Michael opened his eyes, rolled the new memory around in his head until he found a fitting place for it.

“So?” asked Timothy, helping him up.

“You were right,” Michael sighed, turning to one faction of the divided room of warlocks. “There are no dinosaurs.”

 


End file.
